[ let down your guard ]

[fanofthegenre]

The case is wrapped. Ben Conrad, the man that they had pinned down as their suspect, is dead and on his way to the morgue. Beckett sends her detail home for the second time with every intention of luxuriating after the stress of the week in a long, hot shower. Underneath the warming spray, she can vaguely make out the sound of her own phone, but

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[bestsellingego]

The heat is incredible. An exploding, overwhelming, luminous wave that appears to split the whole block down the middle, like God drawing a finger down the center of the sun. The force of the explosion sends Castle pinwheeling in place, crashing against the spokes of a wrought iron gate. He can still feel the heat on the back of his neck. No, no, no -- and his heart's a dull, rusty hammer in his throat as he turns around, watching the pieces of her apartment split across the black sky. Kate. Oh god, Kate.

Someone across the street screams and for a second, Castle thinks it's her; thinks that, somehow, the blast threw her out the window and onto the pavement and now he's going to have to look at the remains of grit and stone and glass and see Beckett -- see his partner -- crumpled in the gutter. No. The scream doesn't fit. It's a women, a pack of leashed dogs at her feet, who's doing the screaming instead. Castle sucks his voice up from the bottom of his chest: "Call an ambulance!" The dog walker doesn't seem to hear him. Her canine

[bestsellingego]

Castle registers the gesture and the connection and lowers his eyes, like a shade's passed over the both of them. "I know," he says, 'gives her arm a small squeeze. "Look, I'm sure we can get a ride with one of the duty cops. Let me talk to a couple of people. Wait here."

A couple of blues, not from the 12th, stand around a flashing squad car. They keep throwing sympathetic looks in Beckett's direction and Castle can read the anger on their faces. That's the great thing about cops in this city -- an attack against one of them is considered an attack against them all. There're few professions left in the world that have that kind of solidarity and camaraderie; in fact, he's pretty sure that if he dropped dead tomorrow, a couple of his contemporaries would throw parties.

The cops offer to take them both downtown and Castle comes back to Beckett, sweeping his arms toward the squad car with undue bravado. "Your chariot awaits, madame."

[fanofthegenre]

As Castle heads off to talk to the cops waiting by the squad cars, Beckett catches a glimpse of Esposito and Ryan's heads as they navigate their way through the press of bodies and out of the apartment. They each manage a sympathetic smile, but by the time they reach her, it's all business from there - except for the moment when Ryan presses something into her hand - her mother's ring, still on the original chain. Beckett slips it around her neck with a grateful smile

[bestsellingego]

The ride downtown is quiet, and Castle spends most of it just trying to catch his breath. Occasionally he'll risk a glance in her direction, like he's trying to confirm that she's still there and not spread in a thousand different pieces all over midtown. The squad car has to fight evening traffic outside of Castle's building and he flicks his lights and bleats the siren to clear a path.

Castle gets out and meets Beckett on the sidewalk. "What does this make, two slumber parties in as many nights? Hope I have enough Rocky Road to get us through."

The building is quiet. Castle lets them in through the front door and calls out to see if the other occupants are around. He turns to Beckett. "Alexis must be at a study group." He does not comment on his mother's whereabouts. "You know where the shower is. There're fresh towels in the linen closet. You want me to get you some clothes until they can scrape yours out of your closet?"

[fanofthegenre]

"Believe me," Beckett murmurs, drawing her arms around herself, "I wouldn't have done this under normal circumstances. I think Esposito and Ryan are already looking at us funny after the first one

[bestsellingego]

With the shower going, Castle has a little time to clean house. He's not in his apartment enough for it to devolve to Level 4 Bachelor Status, but there are a few scattered messes -- remnants of last night's cooking experiment (Chicken Marsala d'Castle) in the sink, a couple of shirts crawling across the back of the couch, Alexis's school books on the coffee table -- that he feels compelled to clear. He's shoving a pot into the dishwasher when Alexis calls, having seen the blowup at Beckett's apartment on the news

[fanofthegenre]

Most of her cuts are superficial, the kind that really only need to be rinsed and washed to begin to heal. The hot water soothes her knee a little more. What takes the most time for Beckett is scrubbing her hair, fingernails digging into her scalp to wash every remnant of ash and dirt and grime from the strands. She snags a bottle from inside the shower - Alexis's, from the looks of it - and proceeds to lather, rinse and repeat until her scalp almost starts to tingle from the effort. She's struck then by the eerie parallel - this is what I was doing just before the explosion - but the only thing that keeps her grounded is the knowledge that he can't touch her here. Not now. Not ever again, if she has a say in it

[bestsellingego]

When she finds him, he's perched on the edge of the couch, watching the news coverage on TV. The news camera is in the middle of a long, slow upward shot of Beckett's ruined apartment, the fire crews standing around in their yellow slickers. It's got to be footage from earlier in the evening because Castle sees himself standing off to one side, his face stony and pinched. He changes the channel when Beckett walks into the room.

"Hey." A nod to the sweats and t-shirt. "Sorry I didn't have anything else, but I figured you wouldn't want to wear anything of mom's. Peacock feathers and sequins aren't exactly sleepwear." He rises and makes his way around the back of the couch, hands at his sides. He's worried as hell, and probably doing a poor job of keeping it off his face. "You want anything? Something to eat? I'm pretty sure we've got leftovers."

-- As a dirty pot submits to gravity and slides, loudly, into the sink.

Castle's smile is apologetic.

[fanofthegenre]

"No, it's fine," she murmurs, managing a brief and sincere smile of gratitude. "It's better than anything I could've fished out of the apartment, anyway. Esposito said my clothes are still intact, but everything smells like smoke." Her expression changes to reflect how she feels about that, exactly, as she curls her hurt wrist in against her chest and brings her other arm up underneath it, almost like an animal shying away from using an injured leg. "And definitely better than sequins," she adds, taking note of the tension he holds in his shoulders even as he walks around the couch to her.

The sliding pot briefly startles her, but she's learned to swivel with her whole body or just her head so as not to put further strain on her knee. When she realizes what the cause of the noise was all along, her smile turns sheepish.

"Sorry," she murmurs, directing her gaze back to Castle's face. "Guess I'm still a little on edge."

[bestsellingego]

"I can't imagine why. Here --" he pulls a couple of display pillows off the couch and tosses them onto the floor "-- sit down. I'll put on a pot of tea or something." A frown line appears in the center of his forehead as he tries to recollect whether or not he actually has any tea, or if he's just spent the last seven years mainlining coffee.

On his way to the kitchen, Castle throws over his shoulder: "You're gonna' have to give me a couple minutes to get your room ready. Mother moved in with her boyfriend a couple of days ago and I haven't had a chance to take down the trapeze." This is, of course, an exaggeration -- but only slightly. "But, seriously, stay as long as you need to." A glance. "Want to. Just as long as you bring it on board game night."

[fanofthegenre]

Beckett's eyes follow him into the kitchen even as she takes a seat on the couch, leaning back against one arm and stretching her legs out towards the other side, her arms cradled across her front. "Whatever you have is fine, you really don't need to go to any extra lengths for me," she's quick to assure. In fact, she'd prefer not to receive any special treatment. It would only exacerbate the situation and the way she feels about it.

"I don't want to be any trouble," she calls back, casting a brief glance in the direction of the television, but she can already hear Castle's answer in her head before the words even leave her lips. She wouldn't be any inconvenience, according to him, but she's not entirely certain he'd say that without bias. Still, there's a comfort in knowing she's safe here - safer, even, than she would be anywhere else.

[bestsellingego]

He raspberries his disagreement and starts rummaging through cabinets in search of the last good tea in the place. "Trust me, you're probably gonna' hate to hear it, but I prefer that you stay here instead of at a hotel." He finds a box of Oolong way in the back and gives it a cursory sniff. "Or, worse, on a couch at the precinct." The tea passes some measure of muster and Castle gets two mugs down from the rack.

"Besides, we're not gonna' be here that much anyway, right? Gonna' put this guy in lockdown before the end of the week." Hell, he's going for total optimism at this point. 'Hard not to count your blessings after a night like tonight.

[fanofthegenre]

She's left the hair tie from earlier around her wrist, and upon quick inspection, her hair feels dry enough for her to be able to pull it back without finding damp spots later. It's a little trickier to do with a stiff wrist, but she manages a decent job, a few rebellious strands falling regardless to graze over the curve between neck and shoulder.

"I guess you're right," she adds. "On both counts." Mixed in with the general feeling of pissed-off is the need to go back out there and see this case through - and she's not going to let Shaw or anyone else tell her she can't. Not after this.

[bestsellingego]

Castle briefly disappears behind a cabinet door, looking for a kettle. "I've still got the case file open on the table --" and, because he knows she's gonna' tear him a new one for walking out of the precinct with things that don't belong to him "-- I was just borrowing it. Maybe we can take a look. See if there's anything else we missed."

He doesn't think he's pushing her back into a place she doesn't want to be. Castle likes to think he knows Beckett, and he knows that she's not gonna' give in to shellshock and forget about being a cop.

[fanofthegenre]

"Wait, where did you get the - " Beckett starts, only to realize he's given her her answer. She moves up from the couch to where he's got the case file spread open in neatly organized piles, crime scene photos scattered throughout. She leans forward to study them, resting her chin in her hand, glancing over details and looking around for a pen to take notes and add to where the file leaves off.

"You could've at least had a copy made instead of taking the originals," she mutters, loud enough to be overheard.

[bestsellingego]

"I thought we were done," he says, making a cameo appearance around the cabinet. Then, with a note of petulance, "I was gonna' give it back. Anyway -- it's here, you're here, let the great deduction begin."

He fills the kettle at the sink and puts it on one of the stovetop burners, holding his hand over the red ring in a completely unnecessary show of checking that it's putting out heat. He comes back to the table and sits down across from her. 'Picks up a few of the crime scene photos and starts to leaf through them. "So Conrad's our fall guy. Our killer-slash-arsonist-slash-all-around-nutjob had to know him. Or have some kind of leverage on him to make him go through that kind of a performance."